Me and Elvis: A Radio Memoir

Around the time I started listening to pop music, the current Elvis Presley single was “Long Legged Girl (With the Short Dress On).” It might have been a good place for me to start — a return to the older, rawer Elvis — but I never heard it as a current. Eleven years into his chart career, Elvis was at his coldest, releasing songs that might occasionally reach the 20s or 30s, but often not even that far. “Long Legged” made it only to No. 63 on the Hot 100.

I knew who Elvis Presley was. He starred in all those movies that I was always seeing promos for on daytime TV. Every so often in TV cartoons or sitcom reruns, there would be some sort of allusion to a character named Elvis and screaming girls, from which I deduced that he must have been like the Beatles at some point. I just didn’t understand why. My firmament was Stax/Volt, the Supremes, the Beatles, and the garage rock that was just evolving to bubblegum at that moment. It’s unlikely that “Long Legged” would have propelled him into that company. 

Even when Elvis became a radio presence, I didn’t pick up on it right away. “If I Can Dream” was the Singer Special-driven comeback and a gold single, but only No. 12 and I don’t remember hearing it on the radio then. I did know the bigger hits that came later — “In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,” “Kentucky Rain” — but I don’t remember them having any particular impact. I recognize “Burning Love” now as a highlight of the summer of ’72 doldrums, but not at the time.

As with “Long Legged Girl,” I probably would have liked some of Elvis’ mid-chart singles from the early ’70s better. But I didn’t hear “Promised Land” or “Steamroller Blues” or “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” until much later. (Now, I hear them once or twice a year on American Top 40 reruns.) I did kind of like “If You Talk in Your Sleep,” which WFIL Philadelphia (under then-MD Joel Denver) tried to break. That one was soulful enough to prompt an R&B cover by Little Milton. It was also four months before “Angie Baby” by Helen Reddy, but with a similar groove.

Even a three-four-year stretch of listening heavily to the early Oldies format, turboed by American Graffiti, didn’t really bring me around. Listening to the first version of WROR Boston is probably where I learned some of the Elvis I liked — “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame” and “Little Sister” in particular — but it was also where I heard “Don’t Cry Daddy,” which was enough to set the cause back. 

But I had a ninth-grade classmate who was obsessed with Elvis and played the early albums, and I heard edgier early things like his cover of the Drifters’ “Money Honey.”  (He was also the person who influenced me to start collecting records seriously.) I started listening to Country radio, where Presley had become a core artist. I began really following the charts. I kind of liked “Moody Blue,” but I was especially intrigued with it as a song you heard on AT40 and in the South, but not on the Top 40 stations I listened to. 

But the next single, “Way Down,” was the sort of off-kilter oddity that I really liked. Also, by then, morbid fascination had kicked in. I read Elvis: What Happened?, the tell-all book by three former members of his Memphis entourage that discussed his drug and other problems at length (at a time when such news rarely made it beyond the tabloids). When I came home on the afternoon of Aug. 16, 1977 to the news on WCAO Baltimore that Presley had died, I wasn’t as shocked as other people were.

In the days immediately after, Washington’s Top 40 WPGC and new Country outlet WMZQ had a lot of crying callers on the air. WPGC put one listener’s earnest-but-clunky recitation of her own poem to music — “We loved you tender/loved you true/you were our dream fulfilled” — and began getting requests for it, even before the first tribute song, “The King Is Gone” by Ronnie McDowell. (The Merle Haggard tribute, “From Graceland to the Promised Land,” which came about a month later, was less hokey and actually touching.) The callers were mostly of a piece — older than my mom, whose tastes were a few years newer — and I finally really understood Elvis as a shared experience. 

Also that August, I was a year into my serious chart geekery, and there was also something exciting about the way that “Way Down” turned around on the Hot 100 and began climbing again after Presley’s death. “Way Down” eventually went gold; in the SoundScan/BDS era, it might have gone to No. 1, and certainly would have in the streaming world. Also, even before Elvis’s death, I knew that “Can’t Help Falling in Love” was regularly the No. 1 song on all-time top 300 countdowns.

Over the years, I learned most of the Elvis mid-chart songs I missed. I knew “Always on My Mind” before Willie Nelson covered it, and “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” before Travis Tritt. I happened to be in Memphis on August 15, 1994, and went to the Candlelight Vigil. I’ve been back to Graceland (on other days) with my wife, and we’ve been back with our daughter. It wouldn’t be hard for me to put together a playlist of cranking uptempo Elvis that I like.

I have a radio friend of similar age. He’s P1 to SiriusXM’s Elvis Radio and went to Graceland almost annually for a while. He’s at a different level of fandom, driven in part by an aunt and uncle who had him hearing Elvis all along. My learning to like the music is probably more comparable to the way that teens teach themselves older music now. But those WPGC callers were an early lesson in respecting the legacy of all acts and the tastes of others. I’m saddened by the death of Olivia Newton-John this week, but particularly annoyed by some of the obit writers who felt the need to make clear just how little they liked her hits personally.

Just before Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis was released, the Los Angeles Times’ Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote a story asking, Does Elvis Presley Still Matter?  Erlewine addressed the cultural appropriation issues that go with discussing Presley now. But in the mid-’70s, Presley was first irrelevant, then risible or tragic to so many people. If you didn’t like him, there were plenty of other reasons, and besides, Pat Boone was the lightning rod for that discussion. Even now, there are living examples — the Alternative stations that for years didn’t play Hip-Hop, except the Beastie Boys, Eminem, or House of Pain. Even then, that likely said more about the industry than the artists.

Erlewine also asked about Presley’s place on the radio now. Even during the late-’80s/early-’90s Oldies radio boom, I remember Elvis being represented by the biggest of the ’50s/early-’60s megahits, but heavily by the post-comeback songs. By the time I was more involved with Classic Hits as a programmer, the only representation of Elvis was “Suspicious Minds” and “Burning Love.” In Canada, there was also, interestingly, “In the Ghetto.” Even now, the Oldies stations that are deliberately older than major-market Classic Hits radio are more likely to go back to the late ’60s, not early Elvis.

Fifteen months ago, in an article pitting the endurance of Bob Dylan vs. that of Paul Simon (in response to a brief Twitter controversy), I saw that Presley was getting 770 U.S. spins (vs. 2,400 for Survivor, most of which were “Eye of the Tiger” alone). Last week, the number was 553 spins. The surprise success of the Luhrmann movie has shown that Elvis endures, but even Peter Jackson couldn’t propel more Beatles songs back on the radio (4700 spins then, 4100 now). On both counts, radio should give that some thought. 

Streaming is different. “Can’t Help Falling in Love” is No. 1 in Luminate/BDSradio—it endures not just because of the recency of the UB40 remake but because it had already established itself as a GOAT song more than 45 years-ago. “Hound Dog,” now powering Doja Cat’s “Vegas,” is among the top five. Slightly further down is both “If I Can Dream” and a live version of “Unchained Melody” that was a posthumous single. 

“Unchained Melody” is one of the songs I heard when I listened to the Elvis Channel on August 9 at 1:30 p.m. ET. Here’s a half-hour of the station during its “Elvis Week from Graceland” programming:

• “Are You Lonesome Tonight”
• “Got a Lot o’ Livin’ to Do”
• “Please Don’t Drag That String Around”
• “Unchained Melody” (1977)
• “I’ll Be Back”
• “Something Blue”
• “Poor Boy”
• “Where Did They Go, Lord?”
• “Way Down (Take 2)”
• “Trouble/Guitar Man”